Pennsylvania’s Democratic and Republican party voters should decide statewide primaries, not party bosses, according to unaffiliated pressure groups that have badgered party leaders this year.

Republican insurgents argue that the practice of endorsing primary candidates takes the choice away from voters. Democrat dissidents have stalled a move by party leaders to consolidate power in the endorsement process.

View full sizeCHRISTINE BAKER, The Patriot-News, 2011Voters turn out during the 2011 primary election to choose their parties' candidates for the November general election.

The two partisan factions might have different notions on how the country should be run, but they share a passionate belief that the institutionalized leadership of both parties has become a barrier between residents and their government.

“There is a growing sentiment among Republicans that robust primaries are a good thing,” influential Pennsylvania GOP strategist Charlie Gerow said. “Along with that goes a growing sentiment that maybe the endorsement process may be done differently or should be done away with altogether.”

Though acting independently, both dissident groups say they are trying to take their parties back from party bosses who are more interested in maintaining the status quo than representing everyday Americans.

“What we’ve learned is that it’s not the state committee that has the power, it’s the leadership,” said Lee Ann Burkholder, who rode her way into the Republican state committee in 2010 on the tea party wave. “These are old, old, old, Republicans who don’t want to see change, and the tea party people are not well-received at these meetings.”

Added Sandy Wolfe, a Democratic state committee member from Cumberland County: “The membership does not want to be told by the leadership ‘This is how to do it.’ It’s happening with the Republicans and with the Democrats.”

Such grassroots pressures is common within both political parties, said Richard Valelly, a political science professor at Swarthmore College.

“They’re all variations on the theme of electability vs. purity” Valelly said. “The activists and the purists want to have people they know will vote in office in ways they would approve of, whereas people who are running parties want to make sure the party is centrally controlled and have people who are electable.”

During the summer, when Pennsylvania Democratic Party leaders from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh moved to have the state party endorsement speak uniformly for all county parties, Wolfe and a group of Democrats successfully objected.

Since then, they’ve been working to lower the threshold needed to endorse candidates from two-thirds to 60 percent, making an endorsement less reliant on support from the state’s two Democratic power centers.

“Up until a few years ago, it was just majority vote, and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh candidates always won,” said Wolfe. “This way, we feel that everyone has an opportunity to express their opinion.”

They originally hoped to ratify the lowered threshold in September, but the scheduled state committee meeting was canceled because of flooding.

Any hope of reviewing the proposal at the next state committee meeting Jan. 12 in State College faded this week.

Democratic state party chairman Jim Burn decided it would be unfair to statewide party candidates to face a possible change to the endorsment process and then a vote for endorsments in the same meeting.

Declared party candidates for Pennsylvania attorney general and auditor general who could be reached agreed with Burn or said they had no position on the matter.

A party spokesman said that the measure would be considered in June but that any changes would not affect the 2012 election.

Meanwhile, some state Republicans have also publicly demanded like-minded endorsement reform from their party leadership.

Several pockets of upstart Republicans had been pushing state GOP committee members to allow statewide Republican candidates to duke it out in primaries without the interference of a state party endorsement.

And in November, the Blair County Republican Women appealed to five area state committee members to oppose endorsing primary candidates when the state committee meets in Hershey Jan. 28.

Lois Kaneshiki, the small group’s president and an active member of the Blair County Tea Party, said they acted specifically to prevent state party leaders from hand-picking which Republican candidate will challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr. in 2012.

“It’s so important for the people to decide this and not a few people in Harrisburg to endorse someone before the primary,” Kaneshiki said. “As far as I can tell, there is very little communication between state committee people and the rank and file. This is what’s wrong with politics, so we’re trying to bring the party back to the people, where it belongs.”

Judy Ward, one of the state committee members Kaneshiki targeted, expressed empathy but favors case-by-case endorsements because she says party leaders usually know best how to get their candidates elected.

“If there is a lot of great candidates in the race, then you don’t need an endorsement process,” said Ward, who has met with the Blair group. “But there are also times when an endorsement is very helpful.”

Currently, both Pennsylvania parties decide whether they will endorse a candidate in each statewide primary. But both usually choose to endorse, and the endorsed candidate almost always wins the primary.

Many, like Burkholer, see this approach as dictatorial.

“We’ve been told we’re not good Republicans because we don’t toe the party line,” she said. “Well, the Republican Party helped put us into this [poor economic] situation the country is in.”

Burkholder, who is also a founder of the York 912 Patriots, said voters of all political stripes are also responsible for letting their respective parties decide their primary choices.

“We started to look at the candidates the party was handing to us, which we should have done all along,” she said, citing the 2004 GOP endorsement of then-U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter over challenger Pat Toomey. “All of us bear some blame.”

Toomey, a favorite of fiscal conservatives, lost narrowly to Specter in 2004 but so spooked him six years later that Specter switched parties in a failed attempt to stay in the Senate. Toomey went on to win the seat in 2010.

Judy Brown, a Pittsburgh resident who also joined the GOP state committee in 2010 with the tea party wave, said she’s become disgusted with top-down directives issued by party leaders, particularly with candidate endorsements.

“I saw the way these endorsement votes get taken, how the establishment votes,” Brown said. “They’re told to vote one way and that’s the way they vote. They’re so controlled by the powers-that-be, it ticked me off.”

Brown, who plans to distribute a mailing list of GOP state committee members to anti-endorsement activist groups, estimates that a third of Republican state committee members are against endorsing primary candidates but that “the remainder will do whatever they’re told.”

That outcome would not surprise Swarthmore’s Valelley.

“The establishment is the establishment because it’s been successful,” he said.

“Endorsements are an important tool to have,” Demme said. “It’s healthy to have different people come out and support candidates, but at the end of the day, voters are actually the ones who’ll make the final decision.”

Though Republican Party stalwarts expect the anti-endorsement dissidents to kick up dust next month, most are confident things will return to normal.

“There will be discussion about it, then an open vote, and ultimately there’ll be an endorsement,” Armstrong County GOP Chairman Mike Baker said. “It’s going to happen in the Senate and attorney general’s race.”

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